I look at the pictures and I can't even imagine what it must be like over there. I'd imagine, since I've thankfully never gone through it, that a fire would be better than a tsnuami because at least you can go back to the place your house once stood, even if said home is nothing but charcoal and bits of melted plastic and metal. With the tsunami there's just no telling where it once was. Sure, roads may have survived and that can indicate where things probably were but the place where your family's home may have been could be buried under tons of mud and the remains of other people's homes. Or the remains of other people.

I look at the faces of the people in the pictures and there just seems to be such shock and pain at the devastation and loss that it's almost uncomfortable, like inadvertently catching someone during some private, intimate moment. I know that the pictures are important, that we need to see the cost of what's happened there, but they make me wonder if the pain in Japan is ours to share.